Christmas,
1894: As Dr Watson is feeling lovelorn and melancholy, Mr Sherlock Holmes
is conducting bloody forensic experiments. How does this connect to
a surprise visitor, a brutal murder, and the reappearance of an infamous
spectral hound?

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Major
References: “The
Hound of the Baskervilles”

Placement
: This
Misadventure takes place on December 24/25 1894. In “the Canon”,
this places it between “The Norwood Builder” and “Wisteria
Lodge”-- if agreement can be reached as to where WIST is placed, which,
frankly, is unlikely.

Of
singular interest?

*How
many wives did Watson have?

Watson's first wife is a mystery, though prominent Sherlockians
speculate that Watson travelled to America in 1884, where he meets and
woos Constance Adams; they are wedded in England in 1886.
Presumably, Constance dies soon after, because Watson marries Mary Morstan
-- wife no. 2-- at the end of "The Sign of the Four"
(1888). Mary must have been as unlucky with her health as Constance,
for in "The Empty House" (1894), Watson remarks that he
has been bereaved, leaving him free to move back into Baker Street.
The good Doctor is married again by the time of "The Blanched
Solider" (1895), though the third Mrs Watson -- is never identified.

*Why
were so many of Holmes’s young and attractive female clients named
“Violet”?

There is the marvelous, feisty Violet Hunter in "The Copper
Beeches" (1890); the nervous Violet Smith in "The Solitary
Cyclist" (1895); Violet Westbury in "The Bruce Partington
Plans" (1895); and Violet de Merville in "The Illustrious
Client" (1902). One would surmise that all a young lady needed
to do to gain Holmes's services was to pretend to be called Violet.

*Why
was Holmes absent for most of “The Hound of the Baskervilles”?

"The Hound..." was originally conceived by Doyle as a
straightforward tale of the supernatural, based on the legend of a
spectral hound called Black Shuck that had supposedly haunted the Norfolk
coastline, and another ghostly hound that roamed the bleak landscape of
Dartmoor -- a place Doyle had once visited. Keen on the
possibilities of writing a novel based on these enduring legends, Doyle
returned to Dartmoor and with a map in one pocket and a notebook in the
other, explored the terrain as he sketched out a narrative. It was only
when Doyle began writing "The Hound of the Baskervilles" that
Doyle realised he needed to call upon the services of the arch-rationalist
Sherlock Holmes. The trouble was, Doyle was thoroughly sick of the
character, and had killed him off in "The Final Problem".
"The Hound..." is a work of compromise, with Holmes barely in it
(ironically for his most famous case) and with the more prosaic Dr Watson
taking on the bulk of the protagonists' journey.

*How
do you pronounce “Lestrade”? It seems that Doyle intended
the name to be pronounced the French way ("Lis-trahrd"; rhymes
with "hard"), in much the same way that Robert Louis
Stevenson intended Dr Jekyll to be pronounced "Jee-call",
playing on the rhyme "hide and seek". However, a Cockney
like the Inspector would likely have pronounced his name
"Li-strayed", which is how the name is pronounced in the
majority of of pastiches and adaptations. We never learn Lestrade's
first name, though he is given the initial "G".

*Holmes's
gruesome forensic experiments are established in "A Study in
Scarlet", wherein we see Holmes beating and poisoning a corpse and
noting the reactions.

*
The name “Spedding” is an homage to the character Adrea Spedding from
the film “The Spider Woman” (Universal, 1943)